


Outward Wars

by Raynidreams



Category: Wolverine (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-08
Updated: 2017-03-08
Packaged: 2018-10-01 03:19:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10179494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raynidreams/pseuds/Raynidreams
Summary: From the characters as depicted inLogan: Laura is grown up and witnessing the world fall apart.





	

**Author's Note:**

> 1/ I can't recall the exact words Logan tells her at the end of the movie.  
> 2/ Mutants have started to reappear in the population.

Laura is concluding a deal, smoke billowing from the light at the corner of her mouth when the explosion happens. One minute, she’s smirking and then the next she’s supine in dust and debris, eyes blinded by white and black dots, ears ringing. She crawls from the rubble and sinks into a sewer before hearing fresh screams from above. Alone, buried, surrounded by garbage, she's mired by the thought that perhaps she’s dead. Maybe that last scream of defiance was just that. Her shoulder’s a shattered mess. Her eyes blackened and swollen. Pain blooms. Thirst grates. Her personal brand of contrariness gets her to her knees, and her knees to her feet, and her feet out of there.

Across the dunes, in another bolthole, she collapses and heals gradually. This is where she understands what transpired. The port had been targeted. The wireless says insurgents did it, that rebel mutants and their sympathisers blew up innocent people. _Innocent normals._ The images of blood and iron get repeated, over and over, until they are tattooed on the minds of the general population. Having witnessed a number of illegal passages aboard legitimate boats, Laura knows the truth. The people shown on the distributed pamphlets, the children, the families, were mostly impartials, or the undocumented; those cornered by the threat of a new regime. Many there had been fleeing the encroaching hate as quietly as they could. Difference was difference and not only mutants had things to fear.

A day later, she finds a list with her own face on it. She swears in two languages, annoyed that her image was in the open. She’s wanted as one of the terrorists blamed for the explosion. It records her as missing. _Missing_ , she reflects, such a different place from lost.

She nearly gets caught a week later, swapping bogus cash for food and gas. It didn’t end well for the civvy who stopped her. Nor for the informers Laura was sure he reported to. It also didn’t end well for her fist, but bones heal; it wasn't the first time it had been broken and it wouldn't be the last. As far as she could remember, healing was a gift was first given to her at four years old, when the scientists at Transigen crushed her right fist slowly in a vice to trigger her powers.

 

On a fine night, the sky red, clouds black, she takes a risk and drinks. Alcohol soothes her blood better than sex does. As she leaves the bar, a man she knows stops her. A not so squeaky clean councilman who'd used her services before."Please, I'm desperate. Others’ children and families have been taken. They saying for safety. It's only a matter of time."

For safety… Laura and he know they mean hostage.

"Look at me," she whispers. "How can I help?" Her face is dirty from a fall. Fumes seep from her lips.

"Please?"

Laura recalls then how he has a little girl. Dark eyes and hair, much as her own had been all those summers ago when her fantasy of a saviour ended and then this life began.

She curses, low and without force. "Tomorrow. Here. Alone." She begins to turn away before looking back. "I don't want money. I want goods. Drugs, food… Jewellery." Not all of her contacts were as savoury as her and papers cost. Revving up her bike, she spends the early hours sobering up, speeding determinedly from one reassuringly debase oasis to another. Some were already burned out holes, littering the streets like teeth missing from a skull.

In the fight pits and gambling joints, where even the sturdiest cast furtive looks over their shoulders, she manages to find the front for counterfeiter who hasn't been caught. It's not his talent she needs but his tools. He takes one look at her hollow face and laughs. "Oh, how the mighty-couldn't-give-a-fuck-about-anything has fallen," he says. She gives him back a single bladed salute. They don't fuck, but it comes close. More intimately, he lets her play in his workshop.

"How long will you stay?" she asks him as the coming dawn heralds another day of darkness.

"I'm not going anywhere."

"Then you're a fool," she whispers.

"There will always be places to hide. It’s a big country. There will always also be work for people like us."

"People like us?” She laughs. He has always passed for a norm. His senses were that, a keen eye to recreate anything, bills, paintings, sculptures. He never forgot the shape of a thing once he'd seen it.

“I'm leaving," she mutters, surprising herself with the decision. She'd made this country her home several years ago after burying the last of her siblings.

"And what will you do?"

"As you say, there's always work for someone like me."

 

She turns up to the agreed meeting point moments late, and unpunctuality is her providence rather than caution. The man's sobs as he’s carried away between two bountymen echoes in her ears: "Please, not my child. I'll do anything. I'll sign... How can she be a traitor?"

Laura's chin levels out. She'd been to his home before. She runs.

Inside, his wife is sat at a table, starring into an empty glass. Flies buzz around the halogen lights high above. Her daughter sleeps in a cot upstairs. Laura slips in between the guards; in and out with the mother. Back in, and the child cries out, terrified at the disruption.

Laura fights them free but the child scampers away and falls in slow motion.

Running back, the mother is knocked out.

It’s only on the boat that the woman finally reawakes.

"I couldn’t do anything for them," Laura says, devoid of feeling.

The woman’s face remains a mask as they pull away from the shore. “She was one of you. There was a fire, she should’ve…” she mutters and then trails off. “She was one of you. And you let her be killed.”

Laura's fists clench.

"No wonder they hate you," the woman continued. "Why everyone does... What good are your gifts, what good are _you_ , when innocents still die?"

Laura's one hand unclenches and for a moment she images a larger, careworn hand holding her own.

_Don't be the weapon they made you._

She hides the blades that descend from her other fist in her coat, cursing herself for a fool.

She doesn't reply.

What can she say.


End file.
